Welcome back everyone. I am Cass PNC.
I'm joined as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett
Tomlin. How are you today?
You know, yeah. How are you?
Slogging along we're doing we're trying out a new thing we're
going to try to post one of these shorter videos every week
we basically we literally have ourselves on a timer right now
so we're going to try to keep this as short and succinct as
possible so that we can keep everybody updated with that out
of the way I think it's worth starting this discussion today
actually, let's start with the least important one first
Bennett and I both watched a press conference by David Sachs
who is the crypto czar of the Trump administration, a South
African who is basically like a mini Elon Musk, less successful
less interesting Elon Musk He's. The one who wrote the rape
apology with Peter Thiel. As evil as Elon Musk, but like,
just less successful and less interesting.
Anyway, he did a press conference and it was terribly
stupid. But yeah, go ahead, Bennett, get
into that. Sure.
So David Sachs held a press conference along with GT
Thompson, French Hill, Tim Scott and Bozeman to talk about all
the important cryptocurrency things they're about to do,
which is 2 bills, a stable coin bill and a market structure
bill. The stable coin bill is coming
from Senator Haggerty and the House intends to introduce one
similar. This puts some limits on what
reserves stablecoins would be able to hold.
Tries to set the Fed and the OCC up as the two primary stablecoin
regulators. But because this is important to
Wyoming, included a carve out for state regulator to get like
waved out of federal oversight if there's like a state
regulator overseeing you. And so that's what like any
problematic stablecoin will probably end up doing is trying
to get waved out of the federal regulation into a state
regulator, probably in Wyoming. And so that's the stable coin
bill that they intend to advance.
I want to just quickly also mention that they during this
press conference, the way that they were just talking about
dollar hegemony and the idea of like a, oh, we need, we need
more people to have access to dollars because that will
strengthen the dollar is like completely missing a really
important part of the strength of the dollar, which is that the
government is able to easily stop many nations and
individuals from being able to easily access the US dollar.
And if you make it easier and easier to access the US dollar,
I see why that helps with the velocity of money, but it
doesn't necessarily help strengthen the money.
Well, and if we're talking about access to money, like you
probably don't cut off all federal grants, federal payments
to a variety of different places and try to crash the entire
global economy at the same time. Because a lot of people get
their primary access to money from their jobs before we have
to worry about whether or not they can put those dollars on
whatever blockchains they want. They they need the initial
dollars. And that's the real problem for
most people, right? Democratization of finance is a
lie meant to sell you scams because most people who don't
have access to financial services, it's because they lack
money exempting. There are people who get an
unfair stick but like that's the big part of it.
The other bill is a market structure bill.
It sounds like it's going to be Fit 20 One 2.0, which primarily
punts a lot of cryptocurrency regulation to the CFTC, which as
we recently talked about with Sean Duffy, the CFTC doesn't
have the budget, the manpower or like the wherewithal to do that
kind of regulating. And like, the really problematic
part of Fit 21 is it uses like a hilariously broad definition of
decentralized, which as long as like there's not one issuer or
one person with 20% of the token supply, it like counts as
decentralized and goes into like the CFTC.
These little exemption play playbook.
I'm broad strokes for these bills.
There's little subtle details you can get into if you hate
yourself. But like, broadly, the idea is
to punt crypto to the CFC, gut the regulatory agencies, make
sure nothing gets regulated. And oh, Tim Scott says he can
get these bills passed out of the Senate in 100 days.
And Kirsten Gillibrand is a feckless coward who has agreed
to collaborate with fascists to advance crypto regulation for
some reason. Yep.
Cool. OK, so that goes over that.
Also, I think, yeah, we'll link to the Sean Tuffy episode
because there's a lot of reasons that the CFTC, it's not like
it's an incompetent agency, it just doesn't have the ability to
do. This.
Oh, unless we're expanding the CFTCS budget.
Are we giving the CFTC 10 times more budget in the next
reconciliation? I don't fucking think so.
Maybe we should merge it with the SEC, but I guess that's a
different discussion. But that does bring up the SEC,
which is another topic that we want to talk about because it
seems like the SEC will no longer be doing any
investigating anymore, right? Yeah.
So the change was specifically reported by Reuters, and it says
that like SEC, lower level staff can no longer start
investigations without first getting approval of the
politically appointed commissioners.
So nothing's going to be investigated.
It's being described generously in the press as a barrier to
investigations, but it fundamentally means that
basically nothing is going to get investigated unless you can
get these highly politicized actors to agree to investigate
it. We're past the point of like
things not being enforced or them not bringing actions.
There's not even anyone checking.
There's not even going to be anyone looking.
They're not going to be able to get approval.
And the bigger fallout from this is it's going to drive so many
of the lower level staff, the competent people who could
eventually build like some kind of regulator out of the SEC in a
way that even when you build the political will around wanting to
regulate, it will take a huge infusion of funding and a long
amount of time to rebuild the regulatory state they're
getting. Yep.
It's so hard to rebuild these agencies once you've got them to
bear. It's like a metaphor where it's
like, I think generally what you do is if a if you're, if you're,
if you buy a home that's in this state of complete disrepair,
you're often better off just like knocking it down and
rebuilding a new one because it's cheaper.
The way they're gutting these agencies, it's like, what?
Whatever is going to remain by the time someone else comes into
power is going to be hard to imagine that they can even.
It'll take generations to rebuild, Yeah.
There's a finite number of people, lawyers and experts who
are capable and willing of working for this type of group,
and you've just made that group even smaller, you know?
Yeah, we should also then, since we're on this general thing, we
should talk about how our favorite free speech advocates
have now made it a crime to report on Elon Musk's Doge
collaborators. So two things here.
First of all, we're going to link to the Wired reporting.
You can find that in the details of the episode below, or if
you're listening on a podcast, you can find it in the episode
notes. The reporting is fantastic.
I urge you to become a member of Wired.
Pay them. They're doing amazing work
covering the coup. And what they did was they went
ahead and they named these individuals Akash Baba, Edward
Korstein, Luke Fariator, Gautier, Cole Killian, Gavin
Kliger and Ethan Xiaotran. The reason we're naming them is
specifically because of our last episode with Ed Zittron where he
said a really important part of this is naming names.
So these individuals are interns.
They're no ones. They're interns at the DOGE, the
Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is.
Not a department. Is not a real governmental
department. They're interns there and they
basically went in office space style and started asking people
what their duties were and changing code, doing all kinds
of things that the office of what is it, Office of Personal
Management, whatever. It is, yeah.
So they took over there. They like went into Office of
Personnel Management, they went into Office of Budget
Management. They have connected unauthorized
devices into like the Treasury's secure payment systems.
And I was initially reported that was read access.
They apparently have both read and write access to these
payments. Despite the there being court
injunctions against like the federal funding freezes and
things like that. There are still people reporting
that like certain agencies have yet to receive their grants and
things like that. There's still gaps which seem to
suggest that the Trump administration is not perhaps
completely adhering to the court injunction so far, which is
illegal. We're going to keep saying it.
Thanks.
You know, and Chuck Schumer really nailing it home for these
guys, huh? A bill to a bill to make sure
that that what was already illegal is acknowledged as.
Chuck Schumer is worried the coup may make your chicken wings
expensive. And he's right.
It will. But like, there's a coup.
Chuck, there's a there's a coup Anyway, Yeah, yeah.
Great points. Great points.
Ed Martin, the Attorney General for DC, has threatened an ex to
prosecute people revealing these names and these details and
things, which, you know, seems like an illegal use of state
power to silence journalists, critics in the press in a
complete and utter violation of the 1st Amendment.
And I want to keep saying that Elon Musk is like, quote,
tweeting all these people and saying, like, that's illegal,
but there's no law. He's referent.
Like, this is not illegal. It is not illegal to name names
of people destroying the government.
Which makes it, which makes it especially terrifying that the
attorney general for DC is like, yes, President Musk, I agree
with you that this is a crime we need to prosecute.
Like even even I need, I need everyone in the audience to
understand even if you, you win your federal case and it gets
thrown out, by the time it gets thrown out or whatever, there is
a good chance you are like bankrupt, unemployed, and your
life has been ruined because like the case has been brought
against you. And the effect that has.
And that is their goal, to chill and silence and cut people off,
make people afraid to say, Akash Bob or Edward Korstein or any of
these people, because it means that they risk ruining their
entire life. Yeah, which is silly.
It's silly this idea that they would go out like I'm.
It's not silly in that I don't think they'll do it.
That's not what I'm saying. I it's very possible they do do
this stuff, which again points to our, our last episode with Ed
where it's like I specifically said they were gonna sue people
about this and they were gonna, I didn't say arrest cuz I
thought that would go too far. But if they do, am I surprised?
No. But does that mean we all need
to shut our mouths? Well, no.
Then they win. So our job as content creators
and members of the press, we need to push back as hard as we
possibly can against this stuff. So yeah, proud proudly name
names if you have the opportunity to and.
We should also mention, as part of his efforts to dismantle the
federal government and illegally stop funds that Congress has
already appropriated, Elon Musk has put in his sights the
OCCRRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project,
which receives a large portion of its budget from federal
initiatives, often through agencies like USAID and things
like that, that are directing it to OCCRP because they report on
things. One of the, I think it was a
grouper, but it might have been some other kind of alt right
crazy person on X that Musk was retweeting was like, why did the
government fund the OCCRP when they went after Rudy Giuliani
and Elon Musk like quote tweeted it and was like, we're going to
cut this off. And obviously there's obvious
reasons Elon Musk doesn't want the organized crime and
corruption reporting project to exist.
Like it's in the name why he doesn't want it to exist.
Exactly. And you know, Bennett and I
were, were posting about this over on Blue Sky and I just want
to point out that Oliver Rivers actually quote tweeted Bennett,
who had said something about how the OCCRP was getting, you know,
they're trying to defund it. And Oliver Rivers, who's the COO
of the OCCRP, said we're not going anywhere.
So that's, that's what I love to see is these journalists
basically putting their, putting their foots down and saying,
Nope, this is bullshit. We're we're, it doesn't matter
if they defund us. Like we are going to be a
successful organization regardless.
So I, I'm, I'm really proud of them.
And if you can, if you can afford to support OCCRP, why are
Rolling Stone? There's so many people doing
really good work out there. Please, if you have an
opportunity, I'm begging you, it's now or never.
You might not have a Wired or a Rolling Stone in a year or two
based on this administration. So pay for it now, because the
work they're doing is super duper duper important.
And I think that's basically where we're at.
They have illegally seized the levers of power in the
government. They are attempting to destroy
the ability to regulate, prosecute, investigate.
They are setting themselves up for complete and utter
corruption, graft and just dismantling of the entire like
infrastructure and I guess we all have to talk about.
It Yep. And This is why we hedge with
with cast coin guys. This is why we hedge.